Silent film w/ ghosting

[johnny_b]

The US BD release of this French serial was, I think, derived from a 25fps master and set to 1080p @ 23.976fps, maybe by dropping frames as the scrolling credits created for the new master are not smooth. The new EU release (I think from the same master) doesn't have this issue but it's 1080i @ 25fps. Both releases have ghosting on movement every few frames. Sample from the new release below:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/c42yhtob1msg7r0/fantomas.mkv/file

As best I can tell it looks like a pattern like this:

3434344

So I tried TFM/Tdecimate with cycle set to 25 and cycler set to 7. I still ended up with a lot of frames with ghosting, though. I also tried QTGMC and SRestore but that didn't look any better.

Any suggestions to get rid of the ghosting?

[johnmeyer]

I would try to get the movie back to its original frames by deleting both the dups and the blends. Unlike some blends where SRestore can restore frames/fields that were blended, but never shown all on their own, this sample's blends are simply blends of adjacent frames. Both of the frames used for each blend are always fully intact and therefore do not need to be recreated (which is what SRestore does).

The dups can easily be removed with TFM/TDecimate, but I don't immediately have an idea on how to remove the blends. If I were doing this, I'd first do the easy part and set TFM/TDecimate to eliminate the dups. Then, I think there is a way to use the same tool to remove the least similar, rather than the most similar frames.

Once you have the original, pristine frames, you can either choose to simply set the playback speed at somewhere between 12 and 16 fps (whatever looks good to you); you can add your own pulldown; or you can try using motion estimation, like Peter Jackson did with his WWI documentary.

[johnny_b]

Thanks - I can get TFM/TDecimate to remove the dupes with TFM().TDecimate(cycle=25,cycler=2) but the blended fields are a real pain. I couldn't see in the documentation a way to remove blended frames or the most different frames. I tried this instead:

Separatefields()
SelectEvery(50,0,1,4,5,6,7,10,11,12,13,14,15,18,19,20,21,22,23,26,27,28,29,32,33,34,35,36,37,40,41,42,43,46,47,48,49)
Weave()

In AvsPmod I saw an occasional dropped frame, blended frame or duplicate frame. When I actually used the script, though, I didn't notice any issues in the resulting file. Hopefully this pattern holds for the other episodes, but if you have other suggestions please let me know.

[johnny_b]

Well turns out the overall pattern is the same by episode but the starting frame is different by episode (presumably due to the intro credits added for the re-release). A bit of a pain but manageable anyway.